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Nigeria is not difficult to lead because its society is difficult to govern. It is difficult to lead because leaders have turned diversity into a business model.
There are lies Nigerians tell themselves and the world. The explanation goes like this: Nigeria cannot be governed because Nigerian society is stubborn, tribal and religiously fanatical.
These lies are comforting because they shift blame from the architects of the crisis to the victims. The reality is much worse. Nigeria is difficult to lead because those who want to lead have systematically weaponized every fault line, every grievance, every scar, and turned them into tools of extraction. And people, betrayed generation after generation, have learned to survive by clinging to the only identities that ever gave them any advantage: religion, ethnicity, and the past.
The 2026 Africa Poll survey found that 42% of Nigerians view polarization as high, and 49% agree that the country is more divided today than four years ago. Political divisions in particular have increased according to 55% of respondents. These are not abstract numbers. This is a judgment on a political class that failed to build a nation and instead built an identity market.
Start with religion. Nigeria’s population of 220 million is almost evenly divided between Muslims and Christians, with the north majority Muslim and the south majority Christian. On paper, this is diversity. In practice, this is leverage. Islamic clerics polled more than 17 million votes during the 2023 elections, according to research from Lagos State University. Pentecostal pastors have built empires of political influence, trading prophetic support for access to state coffers. The Africa Poll 2025 survey found that 44% of respondents agreed that religion played an important role in creating division and polarizing the country under Tinubu’s rule. A religious leader in Kaduna expressed this very clearly: “Our leaders do not want to integrate society but prefer to divide society so they can steal money”. That’s the business model. Not faith. Extraction.
The loss of life was astonishing. ACLED data shows nearly 53,000 deaths from targeted political violence with a religious dimension since 2009. In 2025 alone, Nigeria suffered 11,968 conflict-related deaths, surpassing several active war zones in the Middle East and North Africa. Terrorism deaths rose to 750, a 46% increase from 2024, with ISWAP and Boko Haram accounting for 80% of the fatalities. They are not people who died because Nigerians couldn’t get along. They die because violence produces results, and the people who suffer the consequences are not the ones who profit from the violence.
Then there is ethnicity. The 2020 Afrobarometer survey found that 35% of Nigerians reported experiencing ethnic discrimination at least once in the past year. The Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution’s 2025 survey found that more Nigerians are inclined towards ethnicity than nationalism. This wasn’t an accident. This is the result of a political system that rewards ethnic mobilization and punishes national vision. When a governor can provide infrastructure for his country and is celebrated by his people, and when that governor loses a national election because his ethnic group is not large enough, then the lesson to be learned is: ethnicity is the only reliable investment.
The Igbo people of the southeast know this better than anyone. The Nigeria-Biafra war killed millions, and more than fifty years later, questions about Biafra still persist. Between January 2023 and July 2025, ACLED counted 1,683 incidents in southeastern Nigeria resulting in 2,109 fatalities. The historical trauma of the war is deeply embedded in the collective memory of the Igbo people, reverberating through generations, but authentic reconciliation and healing remains difficult. After the war, the Nigerian state implemented a policy of willful amnesia, preferring to “move on” rather than undertake a reflective national reckoning and reconciliation. Official suppression of Biafra memory contributed to a long-lasting sense of exclusion among many Igbo people. When Nnamdi Kanu protesters filled the streets in October 2025, security forces responded with tear gas and mass arrests. The state chose oppression over reckoning. Again.
The silence surrounding the civil war is not accidental. That is policy. Nigeria rarely teaches its own history in schools, and a study at Princeton University is currently testing the impact of a history and peace education course on 3,000 Nigerian high school students. The fact that this is necessary—that an experiment is needed to see whether educating young Nigerians about their past can promote peace—tells you everything about how this country is governed. You can’t build a country on a foundation of lies and expect it to survive.
The electoral system is where this rot is most visible. Former Minister of Education Oby Ezekwesili, while speaking at the 2025 National Electoral Reform Summit, warned that weaknesses in the electoral system have eroded public trust in institutions. “Nigerians are concerned about the culture of democracy in the courtroom, where elections are increasingly decided in the courts rather than at the polls,” he said. “Delays and conflicting rulings have created the perception that the courts, not voters, determine the outcome.” He noted that the judiciary had taken an outsized role in the electoral contest, undermining credibility and forcing parties to seek redress through the courts. This is not a glitch in Nigerian democracy. This is a feature that ensures the political class does not have to answer to the people.
The public has taken notice. Voter turnout is declining. In Anambra State, voter turnout fell by 58% over eight years. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has openly expressed concern that 25% to 30% voter turnout in every election cycle is not encouraging, and warned that the change that Nigeria’s young generation wants cannot be achieved through apathy. Nearly 70% of registered voters in Nigeria are young people, but they are staying home in droves. They have calculated it. The system does not count their votes. That means their silence.
And when silence wasn’t enough, they left. The Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Tanko Sununu, acknowledged that more than 1.4 million Nigerians emigrated in one period, “most of them highly skilled”. The health sector is bleeding. No less than 20,966 Nigerian health workers moved abroad in one year, including 3,919 doctors, 7,487 nurses and midwives, and 6,861 medical laboratory workers. A study of Nigerian medical and nursing students found that 72.9% expressed an intention to practice abroad, and 32.7% had no intention of returning. They left Nigeria not because they hated it. They fled because the state had no plan to accommodate them other than their usefulness as a voting bloc and cheap labor.
The root of all this is not culture. It is structure. The World Bank’s October 2025 Poverty and Justice Summary found that the number of Nigerians living in extreme poverty increased from 34.7% in 2018/2019 to 41.8% in 2022/23. The poverty rate in the northern zone is 57.4% compared to 21.2% in the southern zone. According to the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics, poverty rates in the North East and North West regions stand at 71.9% and 64.8% respectively, compared to 12.1% in the South West region.
The literacy rate in the southern region exceeds 80%, while the North West and North East regions record literacy rates of around 44% to 48%. This gap does not represent an abstract academic debate. This reflects the millions of young Nigerians whose opportunities are limited by circumstances beyond their control.
This is what actually divides Nigerian society. Not God. Not a tribe. Poverty. Poll data in Africa is unambiguous: it is poverty and state weakness that predict conflict, not ethnic composition. That is, intergroup tensions in Nigeria are better understood as the result of structural inequalities and governance failures rather than diversity. Corruption was identified by 40.6% of respondents as the main cause of political disintegration, followed by ethnic divisions at 26.8%, poor leadership at 24.0%, and religious intolerance at only 8.7%. Read the numbers again. Religion, considered the thing that is destroying the Nigerian state, is at the bottom of the list. Corruption is at the top of the list. Leaders know this. They have always known this. That’s why they keep the conversation focused on things that divide, not on things that can unite.
There is a counter-narrative, and it is important. The National Social Cohesion Index increased to 48.8% in 2026 from 46.8% in 2025, which is the highest level since this survey was conducted. For the first time, a majority of Nigerians—52%—identified themselves as Nigerians, not by ethnicity, religion, or region. This is a real breakthrough. This shows that the poison is not permanent. But this also creates a striking paradox: increasing perceptions of polarization coincide with a strengthening of national identity. Nigerian society is becoming more divided even though they are told that they are becoming more divided. Identity breakthrough is real, but fragile. This can only be sustained if the structural causes of intergroup tensions can be addressed.
The question is whether the political class will allow that to happen. The answer, based on all available indicators, is no. This system is designed to prevent that. The court decides the election. Parties are vehicles for patronage, not ideology. Religious and ethnic entrepreneurs who profit from divisions have no incentive to stop. And the international community, which loves to lecture Nigeria about democracy while buying oil and selling arms, has no interest in upsetting an arrangement that keeps the country weak enough to manage but strong enough to be useful.
Nigeria is not ungovernable. This was intentionally set up incorrectly. The difficulty in leading Nigerians is not a function of their character. It is a function of the system that makes betrayal profitable and unity dangerous. The young people who left were not cowards. They are the smartest people in the room. Those who survive and fight are not fools. They are the bravest. And those who exploit division are not leaders. They are parasites that mistake their hosts for meal tickets.
The real question is not whether the Nigerian people can be led. The question is whether they will be led by someone who wants to lead them somewhere other than back to the same old trenches. Until that happens, this country will continue to experience its best and brightest, and the people who survive will continue to cling to the only thing that makes them feel safe: their God, their tribe, and their memories of a war that no one will admit they lost.
By: Allen Durueke
